How To Play JJ Against A 3Bet

This hand is from 25NL Online. Hero decides to raise for a middle position with jacks, totally standard. Gets 3bet by the small blind and here we are. The small blind in this situation is a 19/14 over 1080 hands with a 5% 3 bet. ICM Monster says, “I get 3 bet and put him on a wide range from the small blind. He is a little loose, but pretty ABC poker except for playing draws aggressively. I don’t want to 4 bet and blow him off the weaker end of his range, so I call.”

So in general I’m going to be okay with this. One quick tip that I can give you and just really anyone who plays online, is when you have a decent sample size on someone and over 1,000 hands is definitely going to qualify for that, and you have a decent number on their 3 bet, what you should also check is their re-steal percentage. If someone has a 5% 3 bet, that means very different things if they have a tight re-steal versus a large re-steal. If they have a large re-steal, say like 15%, that means that the majority of their 3 bets are likely going to be re-steals, which means that when they’re 3 betting in a non-re-steal situation, changes are it’s the tighter, stronger part of the range.

You didn’t give me that stat in here so I can’t say necessarily whether this 3 bet is going to be wider, tighter, whether he’s going to view this raise as a steal—I highly doubt it, because it’s from MP1, but those are just some things that you can keep in mind.

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In general here, I have position, we do have a little bit of extra stacked up to start the hand. I’m also going to be calling and we’re just going to play poker from here.

So the flop comes like this and we end up facing this over bet. ICM Monster says, “I find this interesting and pause. My plan from here is to call and let him bluff it off. I highly doubt he’s doing this with his value hands of queens plus, but absolutely doing it with draws to the nuts.”

My main thought process here, given the size, given the size of the pot, given everything, is that regardless of what you choose, you need to make a strong, definitive plus EV plan right this moment. Because if you were to call, the pot is going to be give or take around 20, it’s going to be about 20 back, and you’re going to have one pot-size bet left going into the turn and river. So you’re pretty much exposing your entire stack at that point for better or worse and even if you call here and face a shove in the turn you’re going to be getting 2:1 on a call, so why not plan for that in advance? We can, we have that luxury here.

Create the plan now. You said that you wanted to call and you wanted to essentially bluff off on turns and essentially call them off. That’s okay, if you think that’s what’s going on.

Now, that all being said, I think that he can have queens plus when he takes this line. He may think that you have a hand like nines through jacks or nines through queens and that he’s in a pure value mindset where he can over bet. You’re going to be more inelastic on this texture and you can go from there. I’m not sure if small blind has that thought process or can think like that, but that would at least be a thought process I would have to give someone who can think at least a little bit.

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It’s just one of those situations where you have to deduce as best as you can what you think he’s doing this with. If you think that he’s really airy here, this is like busted ace/king, this is his bluffs, this is some club draws, this is some 45, then you could justify either 1) stacking it off right here; or 2) calling and then calling off all of his turn shoves unless it’s like the worst card in the entire world.

That would be what I would kind of be thinking of planning for here, but again, regardless of what I’m going to do, I’m going to create that definitive plan. Am I going to raise here and stack it off? Am I going to call here and call pretty much every single turn shove? Am I going to commit it on turns if we call here a turn breaks off and he checks? What’s my thought process there?

This is what off-table poker study is good for, is running through all the possible ways that this hand could realistically run out, thinking about how good or bad that is and then creating the plan that you want to take in this exact situation.

If you think he’s really airy, and I like your plan of call here and essentially plan on calling a lot of turns, just go forward from there, I’m happy with that.

But with all of that being said, when we call eight on the turn, he jams, this fold makes zero sense. We just can’t be folding here because it doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t fit in line with the plan. The whole reason why we called the flop is because we thought we were good enough at the time, which means the eight doesn’t really change anything, which means we should still be in that value call mindset. This fold kind of just goes against everything that you were trying to do and that’s why it was a mistake.

This is just something that comes up sometimes, when you’re in these pots where the SPR isn’t super deep or someone over bets and all of a sudden we’re much closer to exposure or commitment than we were if they had made, dare I say, a normal size bet, you have to create that definitive plus EV plan early and that’s what you’re studying off the table, is how to create those plans, what goes into creating a plus EV line, and then of course implementing that, which means following through on your plan. Sometimes you’re going to call off here and you’re going to find out that he has kings. But as long as you thought that he had enough junk in his range, then you’re totally okay. But creating a good plan and then not following through on it is just as bad as creating a bad plan and following through on it with full gusto. That’s just the way that I would visualize a situation like this.

My name is James "SplitSuit" Sweeney and I'm a poker player, coach, and author. I've released 300+ videos, coached 500+ players, and co-founded the training site Red Chip Poker. Contact me if you need any help improving your poker game!

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